So, Warren Won, and Weiss is Out

Well, sort of.

He won't be an Undersecretary of the Treasury, but he will be an adviser to the Treasury.

So, he will still be there, albeit without a budget or staff who report to him.

I suppose that this is as good as can be expected.

Over at Credit Slips, Adam Levitin, has a a very interesting perspective on the reactions to this development:

There've been a bunch of post-mortems of the Antonio Weiss nomination in the press the last few days (see, e.g., here, here, and here). When I read them I often feel like I'm reading a story about a kid who went to a fancy eastern boarding school, where he was head of the literary society, lettered in three sports, and did lots of charity work, but didn't get into the Ivy League school where all of his family and family friends went. The result: shock and outrage that the kid was denied his birthright!

Being nominated for Undersecretary of the Treasury isn't quite like getting into Harvard (or even Yale). Yet reading Weiss's defenders' (and their all-too-willing journalist abetters), one would think that's the story. And that underscores precisely what the problem was with the Weiss nomination, and what Weiss's defenders just don't get (or want to admit they get): the assumption that Wall Street success entitles someone to an important policy position for which they have no apparent qualifications.

The problem with Antonio Weiss was never that he worked on Wall Street. It was that working on Wall Street was his only qualification (besides giving lots of political donations). ……… The problem was that Weiss's Wall Street pedigree was that was touted as his only qualification (unless one counts bankrolling a little-read literary magazine), as if it should be self-evident that anyone C-suite type from Wall Street is qualified for any job at Treasury. ………

If one looks at the actual criticisms made of Weiss by his critics (as opposed to how they were characterized by his defendants), you'll see that the core complaint is that Weiss lacked relevant qualifications for the particular position for which he was nominated. Doing international M&A had very little connection to the position for which he was nominated. Being a wealthy liberal donor with good connections shouldn't result in an important policy position. ………

If Weiss had been the head of a Treasury desk or the head of compliance at a Wall Street bank or had some record of weighing in on policy issues, I don't think you'd have seen the same pushback against his appointment. Yes, there are real concerns about intellectual capture at the Treasury and revolving door problems, but what it comes down to is that a Wall Street background alone should not block a nominee, but by the same token, a Wall Street background alone cannot be what qualifies a nominee.

The degree of self-entitlement that is felt by the movers and shakers in finance, and the degree to which this self-entitlement is blindly accepted by the "very serious people" in government who set our policy.

It explains why our financial policy is so f%$#ed up.